There is no doubt about it. Our Gospel reading for today is a challenging one. It is the only story we have in Mark of Jesus denying healing to someone who asks for it. And not only does he at first deny the healing of the Syrophoenician’s daughter, a child, he does it so rudely and while using an ethnic slur. Is this really Jesus? This is so hard for many Biblical commentators to take that some have decided that he didn’t really mean it. He was really just testing the woman’s faith to see how strong it was. That interpretation feels like a stretch to me. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus doesn’t test the faith of others before healing, he simply has compassion and goes about and heals. Others have tried to soften Jesus’ words by arguing that the Greek word translated as “dogs” really means “puppies” so isn’t really all that bad. Puppies are cute after all. But those who know more Greek than I do say that he wasn’t saying “puppies” he was saying something more like “little bitch.” Not exactly a complimentary statement.
But I think our struggles with this passage are more about us than about the passage. We want a beyond-human Jesus. And we want a Jesus that is binary. We claim that Jesus was fully God and fully human, but in practice we really want Jesus to be only God. Our tiny brains struggle with the paradox of Jesus being both human and God. But if we truly believe what we proclaim, that Jesus was fully human, then Jesus had to from time to time been blinded by the culture of his day and place. His understanding of his mission and God’s Kingdom had to have evolved as he entered more deeply into his ministry. This is what it means to be human. We operate from what we have always known, and this sometimes makes us blind to what is and can be. Being human means being embedded in a culture. It means growing up with a certain worldview. It means inheriting traditions and language and biases—biases that can be wrongheaded and hurtful and alienating. Biases like the exclusion of Gentiles from the community of faith and the circle of those deserving compassion. And our understanding of God and God’s Kingdom is the work of a lifetime that should be always growing and expanding. To be human is to have a limited view that expands as we grow more and more faithful in our following of God.
We also seem to think that the perfection of God means that God has to be all-knowing, all-powerful and never changing. Again, I think this is about our need for certainty and not about what true perfection is or who God is. God is perfect because God is love. True love gives up power, gives up control, gives up needing to know. True love changes for the sake of the one being loved. True love listens. True love responds. True love gives up certainty for the sake of the free will of the one being loved. This is the perfection of God.
Jesus, the human being, understood his mission on earth to be with his own people, the Jewish people. He enters a house wishing not to be disturbed. Is he tired? Probably. Does he just want some time to himself? Likely. He is fully human after all. He has been going nonstop since the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. He has been teaching, preaching, healing, calling, debating, and he as a human being needed some rest. But every time he tries to get some rest somebody finds him. In this case it is a Syrophoenician woman with a possessed daughter. Is it any surprise that he doesn’t respond with politeness and compassion? He is a human being of his time and place. As he has understood it, his mission is not to her and he likely just wanted her to leave so he could get some rest.
And this story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman gives as a model of what we are to do with the biases that we possess simply because we are human. Jesus doesn’t cling to his prejudice. He listens. He allows himself to be changed by his encounter with her. For she is not a woman to be defeated by a few words. She stands up to Jesus and his bias. Perhaps she was this way with everyone or perhaps this is the power of a mother trying to save her child. Either way she pushes back in a way that changes Jesus’ mind. In Mark, this is Jesus’ first face-to-face encounter with a Gentile, and it shakes him. It changes him. It changes the way he sees those who don’t share his ethnicity. Mark’s account of Jesus’ ministry is one of ever-expanding inclusiveness. Jesus’ encounter with this Gentile woman fundamentally changes how Jesus sees and treats Gentiles.
What if the hero of this story is not Jesus but the Syrophoenician woman? She was courageous in her challenge of Jesus’ unhealthy preconceptions. And Jesus models for all who find their preconceptions being challenged the healthy response: listening and changing. We see in this story that inheriting bias is inevitable, but holding onto it is a choice. And Jesus—both God and human—made a choice for compassion, love, and change.
And today is the beginning of our celebration of the season of creation here at St. Andrew’s. For the next month, our liturgy and activities will focus on the gift of creation, our place in it, and our relationship to it. This means my sermons will also be directed by the same themes. So, what does this story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman and creation have to do with one another? Well, I think an awful lot.
Just as we were all raised with biases about other ethnicities, nationalities, classes, genders, religions, and the like, we were also raised with ideas about creation and our relationship to it. Just like the unexamined biases we hold about other people, we tend to think that our biases about creation are just the way things are. They are simply the truth. The way the world was made. But if you spend anytime listening to people from non-Western cultures, particularly indigenous peoples, you will begin to discover that the way we understand creation and our relationship with it isn’t universal. There are other cultures who see creation in a very different way, relate to it very differently, and as a result behave very differently toward creation with very different outcomes.
I am currently reading a book by Episcopal Bishop Steven Charleston, We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope. Bishop Charleston is the retired bishop of Alaska and a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and he is beloved for his ability to weave together indigenous and Christian spirituality in his writings. In Chapter 4 of this book, titled “If the Land Has Anything to Say,” Bishop Charleston tells the story of Smohalla, a Native American spiritual leader of the 19th century who through visions came to understand that a holy covenant existed between God and humans, and that to maintain this relationship, the indigenous Americans must not disturb the earth by dividing it into parcels, by farming, or by selling any portion of the land.
The American authorities and press blamed Smohalla and his followers for stirring up discontent. Bishop Charleston writes, “In every regard, Smohalla rejected settler culture. He did not want their money, their annuities, their schools, their technology, or their churches. He was an iconoclast. He did not see any value in what they offered him.”[1] Smohalla understood that God’s covenant was not simply with humans, but also with Mother Earth. Smohalla wrote:
We simply take the gifts that are freely offered. We no more harm the earth than would an infant’s fingers harm its mother’s breast. But the white man tears up large tracts of land, runs deep ditches, cuts down forests, and changes the whole face of the earth. You know very well this is not right. Every honest man knows in his heart that this is all wrong. But the white men are so greedy they do not consider these things.[2]
From 1850 until his death in 1895, Smohalla never gave in to American demands. And his words still challenge our biases about creation today. If we are honest with ourselves, we do not relate to the earth as a gift from our creator. We do not see the earth as having intrinsic value. We see the earth as a resource to be used for our own benefit. It is there for us to plow, cut down, dig out and use up. We need a spiritual shift of heart. Our worldview needs to change. Smohalla’s words are challenging us, just as the words of the Syrophoenician woman challenged Jesus to open our eyes. Is there room in our worldview for a personal relationship with the earth? Now maybe this sounds too “woowoo” to you. Is Suzannah going to ask us to go out and hug trees? Well, maybe, if it will help you better appreciate the value of the trees you are hugging.
We have all heard the scientific reports. We know what will happen to creation and therefore us who are after all a part of creation if we do nothing about how we are living, moving and having our being on this planet. We don’t need more reports. We also know that all the solutions we need to fix the problem already exist. Science has also told us this. The problem is our resistance to doing what we need to do to fix things. And I think this is because what we really need is a shift in our hearts. We need to see things with new eyes. We need to listen to what creation is screaming at us and really hear it.
In 1855, one of Smohalla’s followers, Young Chief of the Cayuses, expressed an alternate vision from the western vision of creation during a debate over land with Isaac Stevens, the territorial governor of Washington. “I wonder,” Young Chief said, “if this land has anything to say? I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said? I wonder if the ground would come to life and what is on it; though I hear what the Earth says: the Earth says, God has placed me here.”[3] He was inviting the governor to notice that a key player had not been invited to the table. Mother Earth was not being heard. He invites us to notice the same. Are we listening?
In order for Jesus to hear the Syrophoenician woman, he had to be in her presence. In order to hear the Earth, we have to be in the Earth’s presence. Maybe this means you should hug a tree or at the very least sit outside once in a while. Get to really know the piece of earth that you inhabit. Get to know this land that we call home. It is hard to abuse something that you know personally and have grown to love. Listen to what the earth is saying to you and to me. Pray for creation as you would pray for your closest loved ones. For in the words we heard this morning from St. Isaac the Syrian:
One who has [a charitable] heart cannot see or call to mind a creature without having eyes being filled with tears by reason of the immense compassion which seizes the heart; a heart which is softened and can no longer bear to see or learn from others of any suffering, even the smallest pain, being inflicted on any creature.
I end with a paraphrase of the words of Young Chief and Bishop Charleston:
“I wonder if the ground is aware of what I am preaching?”
“I wonder if the earth has anything to say?”[4]
[1] Charleston, Steven, We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope, p. 93.
[2] Ibid., p. 93.
[3] Ibid., p. 98.
[4] Ibid., 110.
